After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

“We had tried desperately to prepare them,” said Tarak Shah, chief of staff for the D.O.E.’s $6 billion basic-science program. “But that required them to show up. And bring qualified people. But they didn’t. They didn’t ask for even an introductory briefing. Like ‘What do you do?’ ” The Obama people did what they could to preserve the institution’s understanding of itself. “We were prepared for them to start wiping out documents,” said Shah. “So we prepared a public Web site to transfer the stuff onto it—if needed.”

More:

But there was actually a long history of even the appointees of one administration hanging around to help the new appointees of the next. The man who had served as chief financial officer of the department during the Bush administration, for instance, stayed a year and a half into the Obama administration—simply because he had a detailed understanding of the money end of things that was hard to replicate quickly. The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.

This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.

The Trump people didn’t seem to grasp, according to a former D.O.E. employee, how much more than just energy the Department of Energy was about. They weren’t totally oblivious to the nuclear arsenal, but even the nuclear arsenal didn’t provoke in them much curiosity. “They were just looking for dirt, basically,” said one of the people who briefed the Beachhead Team on national-security issues. “ ‘What is the Obama administration not letting you do to keep the country safe?’ ”

Lewis writes that six months into Trump’s term, many key jobs throughout the federal government are unfilled — including some at DOE.

Another permanent employee, in another wing of the D.O.E., says, “The biggest change is the grinding to a halt of any proactive work. There’s very little work happening. There’s a lot of confusion about what our mission was going to be. For a majority of the workforce it’s been demoralizing.”

Over and over again, I was asked by people who worked inside the D.O.E. not to use their names, or identify them in any way, for fear of reprisal. “People are heading for the doors,” says Tarak Shah. “And that’s really sad and destructive. The best and the brightest are the ones being targeted. They will leave fastest. Because they will get the best job offers.”

Why is this a big deal? Maybe this is just draining the swamp of useless bureaucrats, right? Well, read on. Lewis sits down with John MacWilliams, who was a DOE senior administrator under Obama. He was the Chief Financial Officer. He’s a former Wall Street guy who was brought in to manage the books, but because he was so high up in the agency, he had to get a security clearance, and learn about all the things DOE does — the most important of which is managing the safety of our nuclear arsenal, and nuclear research. Excerpt:

The list of things that might go wrong inside the D.O.E. was endless. The driver of a heavily armed unit assigned to move plutonium around the country was pulled over, on the job, for drunken driving. An 82-year-old nun, along with others, cut through the perimeter fence of a facility in Tennessee that housed weapons-grade nuclear material. A medical facility ordered a speck of plutonium for research, and a weapons-lab clerk misplaced a decimal point and FedExed the researchers a chunk of the stuff so big it should have been under armed guard—whereupon horrified medical researchers tried to FedEx it back. “At D.O.E. even the regular scheduled meetings started with ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ ” says former chief of staff Kevin Knobloch.

In his four years on the job MacWilliams had come to understand the D.O.E.’s biggest risks, the way a corporate risk officer might understand the risks inside a company, and had catalogued them for the next administration. “My team prepared its own books. They were never given to anybody. I never had a chance to sit with [the Trump people] and tell them what we’re doing, even for a day. And I’d have done it for weeks. I think this was a sad thing. There are things you want to know that would keep you up at night. And I never talked to anyone about them.”

Read the whole thing. MacWilliams outlines for Lewis the top five risks that DOE manages. The fifth one is not something most of us would have thought about — I certainly wouldn’t have, anyway — but if something goes wrong there, we are in serious, serious trouble.

Whether or not you agree with a president’s policies, we all have a right to expect basic competency from any administration. We had that when Democrats were in the White House, and we had that when Republicans were in the White House. We do not have that now. The release this week of the transcripts of Trump’s phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia was an outrage — whoever did that ought to be fired and charged with a crime, if possible — but it revealed once again that our president is an arrogant incompetent. The DOE story shows what happens when that Trump magic spreads throughout the government.

“But Gorsuch” is doing a lot of very heavy lifting. Populism must never, ever be a war on excellence, or even on basic competence. That’s what it has turned into, it appears. Read the story.

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118 Responses to Idiocracy At The D.O.E.

You, on the other hand, are talking about an amorphous abstraction to set your own vision of the world in order.

Yes, are you disagreeing with me because I said “next town” instead of next region or next state (don’t forget I was talking of an amorphous abstraction)? The fact that you think I might not know who you are talking about or what black lung disease is seems to indicate that you agree with my general point – that cultural capital is local and disappears when you move beyond the locality where it resides.

What is it that you are trying to communicate with your examples? That elites could be good and beloved by the working class, if only they were less like George Soros and more like your good doctor (whose name I confess I can’t remember)? How are we defining elites? Is there reason to think there are more of the bad kind then the good kind? What would you put the ratio at? Is the kind who stays in his home town/state/region to fight local problems better than the kind who goes off to the best research universities to find cures for the worlds problems (whether they be diseases, social problems, or technical problems)?

You learn about the importance of energy, and of international relations, in College. But all right-thinking Americans now understand that College is BAD. Therefore, everything you learn in College is BAD. Except what you learn at Liberty University. Maybe.

[NFR: That’s a pretty self-serving caricature. “We in the academy don’t have to examine ourselves critically because everybody outside of our circles who thinks poorly of us is a mouth-breathing deplorable from Jesusland.” — RD]

Thomas Hobbes, you seem to have found your Leviathan, although I’m not sure where you see it. The fact that I disagree pointedly with your amorphous commentary shows that I agree with you? What a vivid imagination!

What am I trying to communicate? I am trying to communicate that financial and social class “elites” do not have an inherent monopoly on intellectual capacity, love of learning, or ability to do productive work. I am also trying to communicate that it is not an inherent condition of the working class, or an agricultural peasantry, even an illiterate one, to hate learning and literacy. What does make a difference is whether a person with substantial intellectual ability or attainment understands what my pastor said some 17 years ago, “the gift is not for you.” How are they using it, for what purpose, and how to they relate personally and socially to the people whose opinion is at issue?

Is this so hard to understand? Are you so anxious to put down the unwashed masses and glorify an intellectual elite as inherently superior to the ungrateful superstitious wretches who love to watch TV and surf on cell phones but despise the scientists whose work made it all possible? Is that your view of the world?

What is YOUR point?

(Turning to M_Young, he leaves out that the immigrant Nicola Tesla actually came up with a better system for harnessing electricity than the native born Thomas Edison. But he has a sound point about the difference between self-taught genius and a self-perpetuating parasitic cast.)

Egypt Steve,
My son’s best friend graduated from Liberty University.
There was a scare in Lynchburg when the bodies of dead animals
were found nearby. It appeared they had been mutilated and laid out for a sinister ritual. People worried it was the work of a satanic group.
It turned out to be an experiment in decomposition carried out by a Liberty science class.
🙂

The television was invented by John Logie Baird, Farnsworth invented the first electronic television. Binary “code” was invented by Baudot, Shannon’s master’s thesis (which I have read) established the mathematical equivalence between relay-switched circuits and Boolean algebra of Boole and Liebnitz. Goddard’s contributions weren’t possible without Constantin Tsiolkovsky and when the US went to build its great rockets, She asked Nazis.

And on that note, Shockley was a eugenicist, spending most of his later years paying retarded people to get sterilized. So maybe it’s appropriate that of your list, his invention is the most authentically American (assuming Thompson and J. C. Maxwell don’t count).

Look, I repeat myself, but insisting that invention or genius has a national character is a guaranteed sucker’s bet.

What does make a difference is whether a person with substantial intellectual ability or attainment understands what my pastor said some 17 years ago, “the gift is not for you.” How are they using it, for what purpose, and how to they relate personally and socially to the people whose opinion is at issue?

I agree.

Is this so hard to understand? Are you so anxious to put down the unwashed masses and glorify an intellectual elite as inherently superior to the ungrateful superstitious wretches who love to watch TV and surf on cell phones but despise the scientists whose work made it all possible? Is that your view of the world?

No, where did I say anything close to that?

What am I trying to communicate? I am trying to communicate that financial and social class “elites” do not have an inherent monopoly on intellectual capacity, love of learning, or ability to do productive work.

By telling the story of a particular doctor? I’m afraid I didn’t get that at all from your post. Nor do I see anyplace where I said anything contradictory to what you now say you are trying to communicate?

What is YOUR point?

My point was that elites can be good people just as easily as working class folks can. That the current anti-intellectual way the term “elite” is used today, meaning a self-perpetuating, largely parasitic caste (curtesy of M_Young) seems somehow to lump together your good doctor, nuclear physicists, engineers, anybody that went to an elite college, and Rod Dreher with government bureaucrats lining their own pockets, Hollywood stars, and George Soros with no distinction between any of them. Rod himself seems to have run into this anti-elitism with his own family.

I assume you are being ironic
Telephone= Alexander Graham Bell, born in the UK, came to the US at age 23
Light bulb= Thomas Edison, son of a Canadian immigrant…
****************
Thomas Edison’s father did hail from Canada but originally the family had lived in the US-or rather the American British colonies. They, like a large number of Canadians, had been Loyalists. So you could also say that Edison was from “old American stock”, too.

“…You people yap about diversity, and then you talk about “immigrants” as an undifferentiated blob. Swedes, Salvadorans, Somalis: same difference!”

Well Noah, I guess by that logic we need to ramp up the number of immigrants from Muslim countries?

“Muslim entrepreneurs have found success in other industries. The following foreign-born billionaires emigrated from Muslim-majority countries and built their wealth in the United States (wealth estimates as of January 29, 2017).

Shahid Khan – Pakistan ($7.5 billion)

He owns automobile parts manufacturer Flex-N-Gate as well as the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars and the English football team Fulham F.C.

Haim Saban – Egypt ($3.0 billion)

Saban earned his wealth mainly in the media and entertainment business. He produced the TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Hamdi Ulukaya – Turkey ($1.9 billion)

Ulukaya is the founder, CEO and chairman of Chobani, the most popular Greek yogurt brand in the US.

Marc Lasry – Morocco ($1.6 billion)

A hedge fund manager, Lasry is the cofounder and CEO of Avenue Capital Group. He is also a co-owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.

Fayez Sarofim – Egypt ($1.6 billion)

An heir to his family’s fortune, Sarofim is a fund manager for a number of the Dreyfus family stock funds and the original and second largest shareholder of Kinder Morgan. He is also a part owner of the NFL’s Houston Texans.

David Hindawi – Iraq ($1 billion)

Hindawi cofounded cybersecurity firm Tanium with his son Orion in 2007.”

I’m pretty much a raging liberal, but I can’t help but think that if it had been Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee, he’d have both cleaned Hillary’s clock and become a very effective conservative President. We would not have seen any of this amateur nonsense going on. Sure, I’d have opposed him too on a lot of issues, but I wouldn’t be worrying about the government literally falling apart and embarrassing us to the rest of the world.

Let me ask conservatives out there, don’t you think Romney would have come up with a plan to actual repeal and replace Obamacare, that could have passed both houses and be signed into law? Not that I’d favor that, but I feel pretty sure Romney would have worked his ass off to make that happen, rather than sit around and whine and undermine the process and do literally nothing to make it happen. I understand that Romney is no radical populist, he’s a mainstream conservative, part of the establishment, maybe even the definition of it. But he’s more than competent, and grasps the broad issues of how government runs and what it needs to keep running. Trump hasn’t even got a clue, and his own people don’t care, as long as he thumbs his nose at the establishment. He’s taught conservatives not to care about this stuff anymore, and that worries me, because I don’t expect Dems or liberals to win every election, but I do expect that when conservatives win, they know how to keep the organs of state functioning rather than going on alcoholic binges and stuffing themselves on junk food and unsafe sex until the whole country contracts AIDS or suffers a heart attack and winds up in the ER. And that’s what Trump is, a failure of the immune system that acts like an auto-immune viral infection destroying healthy tissue because it can’t tell the difference anymore.

Pusillanimous,
I really liked Romney and think he would have made a good president. But there wasn’t enough energy to make that happen.
I think Trump knows we are heading to some form of a one payer healthcare system . He’s travelled abroad and knows how it works.

Jamie, are you watching a mechanical television. Really, you pedantry is ridiculous.

As for your point that science and technology are international endeavors, that is true. Knowledge is communicated across borders; we don’t need the people to go with those ideas, we old stock Americans are quite capable, as shown by the examples I have given, of absorbing those ideas and advancing them.

“…we all have a right to expect basic competency from any administration. “

Wasn’t the $1.0 to $1.5 BILLION in defaulted loans to Solyndra and other solar companies based on the “competency” of the DOE? Wasn’t about $50M to $200m laundered back to the Democrat party as campaign contributions (according to my unnamed sources)?
Why was their no special prosecutors for this fraud? Why wasn’t somebody fired for their level of competency?

The DOE was where Wen Ho Lee stole nuclear secrets from back in 1999. Is this the competency you speak of (I know, I know, what aboutism)

Michael Lewis is a leftist, a very, very good writer (loved Moneyball), but a leftist. His profile of Pres. Obama several years ago was fawning, like a media lapdog.
Mr. Lewis would never write a political story that would show democrats in a bad light. Mr D, my take is that you accept what Lewis writes as the truth, with basically no skepticism.
My bias is that what Lewis writes, in a political context, is terribly slanted at best, and most likely false when evaluated objectively. Lewis would not be able to write truthfully about politics, he is a leftist.

Daily Caller article on the Lewis piece of fiction mentions three outright LIES. How can you possibly believe anything Lewis writes that has any political context? He couldn’t even accurately portray that the loan program is going to lose money overall after ALL write-offs, defaults, AND fees are taken into consideration. Lewis LIED about basic numbers!!! Lewis simply can not write truthfully about politics, he is a leftist.

Do you really think that Lewis would print information from a “source” that told him non-flattering items about leftist? Don’t you think that Lewis would unconditionally print anything negative about conservatives (or non-leftists) that a deep-state partisan “source” told Lewis?

Simply dismantle the DOE. We survived quite well before the DOE was created. SHUT it down. Put the nuclear weapons stuff under the DOD.

Well Thomas Hobbes, now we’re starting to agree. That happens in a good rigorous debate sometimes. We seem to be arguing orthagonally toward the same conclusion.

It seemed from your earlier statements that you considered hatred of intellectual pursuits and those who had intellectual capacity as “elites” to be inherent and inborn class distinctions that couldn’t possibly be alleviated.

Its certainly true that people who devote their lives to academic pursuits on high salaries and live in academic ghettoes can inspire a good deal of disdain. Particularly when they spout nonsense that anyone who has to work for a living could easily see through. My point is that there is no reason the working class can’t be intellectually advanced, and no inherent reason people with advanced scientific skills can’t be respected by the working class for the way they use those skills. As I recall, in my childhood, families who depended on factory jobs did have considerable respect for Dr. Jonas Salk. Because they all knew people among their own families and neighbors who had died of, or been crippled by, polio, and feared for their own children.

Yes, elites can be good people. But sometimes, to remain good, they have to break with the currents and flows and interests of the class they find themselves in. One of the early errors of Soviet communism was thinking it was possible to “classify” people according to their “class origin” and know how to treat them from that point forward.

I rather think that Rod and Ruthie were both intellectuals in their own way. They did different things with their education and their love of learning, and neither fully understood the other’s pursuits and priorities.

What M_Young and Jamie both miss out on is that “invention” is more often than not the result of many people’s work in many places, even on more than one continent, and some lucky person is the one who puts it all together. The more complex the invention, the more true this tends to be.